WASHINGTON — The main reason effective reform of banking regulation isn't happening is because we don't want it to — or at least our politicians don't want it to.

It is something that goes beyond political donations or regulatory capture that bank critics have complained about and lies in the very foundations of our political institutions.

This is the conclusion of two academic experts who come from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum and who focus on "political economy" – the influence of politics on economic policies.

"The failure to prevent the crisis was not a failure of thinking, but a failure of will on the part of our political system," Columbia University professor Charles Calomiris wrote in a paper earlier this year, referring to the 2008 financial crisis.

Calomiris, who is affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author, Stephen Haber, argue in a forthcoming book, Fragile by Design, that the U.S. has experienced a history of systemic banking crises because that is the way our political institutions are set up.

In his paper, Calomiris lists several mistakes by regulators leading to the recent crisis: they didn't measure banks' risks properly or set adequate capital requirements; they didn't enforce even these inadequate requirements because they failed to properly identify bank losses; and they never established a protocol for intervening at an early stage of problems in a bank.

There are many tried and true measures to remedy such problems, but these reforms have not been adopted.

"The primary challenge is not devising effective ideas for reform, but rather, building a political coalition that will support the implementation of such ideas," Calomiris says.

Instead, both domestically with the Dodd-Frank financial reform and internationally with the rules proposed by the Basel banking committee, we have tried to fix overly complex banking regulations with even more complicated rules.

"Is it too cynical to see this exponential increase in complexity of rules," Calomiris asks, "as purposely designed to reduce accountability by dividing responsibility and by making the regulatory process less comprehensible to outsiders?" His answer: "I don't think so."

Anat Admati, a Stanford University professor and an expert on bank regulation, says a combination of "self-interest and confusion" is creating an environment that blocks effective regulation.

"So the issue is not necessarily in this case some of the new economic thinking," she said in a recent video interview with the George Soros-funded Institute for New Economic Thinking. "[It] is really kind of back to basics type of thinking, and not getting confused by narratives that are actually flawed."

In an introduction to the video, Admati refers to "the political economy of flawed claims," which she describes as "a toxic combination of entrenched, self-serving banking myths and the politics of banking."

Chief among these flawed claims, Admati and co-author Martin Hellwig detail in their recent book, The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, is that banks don't need and can't afford more capital to cover losses when they incur.

"We will never have a safe and healthy global financial system until banks are forced to rely much more on money from their owners and shareholders to finance their loans and investments," Admati wrote in a recent op-ed for The New York Times.

As soon as higher capital requirements are proposed, however, the banking lobby attacks them with false and misleading arguments, she says.

"From Wall Street to the City of London comes the same wailing: requiring banks to rely less on borrowing will hurt their ability to lend to companies and individuals," she writes in the op-ed. "These bankers falsely imply that capital (unborrowed money) is idle cash set aside in a vault."

An obligatory cash reserve is something different, however. Equity capital is fully available for lending. In any case, banks come nowhere near using all their available funds to make loans.

There is not much we can do in the short term to alter our political institutions and their compact with the banks, especially in an environment where Congress can't even keep the government open.

But one thing we could do, given the political will, is ramp up that capital requirement. While regulators are currently proposing to almost double the amount of required capital – to about 8% of total assets from about 4% – Admati and other experts believe it should be doubled again, to at least 15%.

This is the level of capital sought for megabanks in a Senate bill introduced last spring by Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown and Louisiana Republican David Vitter.

Needless to say, the Brown-Vitter bill, which drew a harsh reaction from the bank lobby, has not gained much traction in Congress and is hardly in the forefront of debates in Washington at the moment.

There are other "back to basics" measures of the type urged by Admati. A bipartisan Senate bill introduced in July, for instance, seeks to re-establish the separation of commercial and investment banking maintained for decades by the Glass-Steagall Act.

Numerous experts — including MIT economist Simon Johnson, former Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman and Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher — have urged that we simply break up the big banks to mitigate the consequences of another bank crisis.

In short, as Columbia's Calomiris says, there's no shortage of reform proposals. What seems to be missing now, as it was in the years leading up to the last crisis, is "a failure of will on the part of our political system."

Darrell Delamaide has reported on business and economics from New York, Paris, Berlin and Washington for Dow Jones news service, Barron's, Institutional Investor and Bloomberg News service, among others. He is the author of four books, including the financial thriller Gold.